News, Commentary and Insights from the Flash Player and AIR Product and Engineering Teams

Archive for August, 2010

Earlier this year, we released a public preview of Flash Player called “Gala” that included support for H.264 GPU decoding on Mac OS X. We’re happy to announce that this feature is now officially enabled in the latest Flash Player, and it can significantly improve the performance of HD video. You’ll see these additional benefits on Macs with Mac OS X 10.6.4 or later supported by the Apple Video Decode Acceleration framework, including most MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini models shipped in 2009 or later. You can read more about the technical details behind Mac hardware decoding on our earlier blog post. And go get it.

Flash Player 10.1 introduced numerous major performance and power management enhancements, and the Mac in particular benefits from improvements that include full Cocoa support, graphics hardware acceleration using Core Animation, faster code execution, significant memory optimizations, and now GPU video decoding support. We’ve also got some major enhancements in the pipe that will further enhance how content is experienced using the Flash Player – stay tuned.

We’ve just released an update to Flash Player 10.1. Google Chrome users have Flash Player integrated into their browser, and Google has begun pushing out automatic updates to Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll automatically get the latest Flash Player, and most users will be updated within 24 hours (the Dev channel will be updated by the end of the week).

Chrome 5.0 users who can’t wait to get the new version of Flash Player can select “About Google Chrome” under the Tools menu (indicated by the wrench icon near the Chrome address bar) to trigger the latest update.

In addition, developers can view this TechNote to learn how to download a separate version of Flash Player manually and use it with Chrome. However, we recommend that Chrome users simply wait to receive an automatic update and benefit from the seamless upgrade via their browser.